Everything You Wanted to Know About Inject and Extract but were Afraid to Ask

Programmers adding tracing support across process boundaries must understand the Tracer.Inject(...) and Tracer.Extract(...) capabilities of the OpenTracing specification. They are conceptually powerful, allowing the programmer to write correct and general cross-process propagation code without being bound to a particular OpenTracing implementation; that said, with great power comes great opportunity for confusion. :)

This document provides a concise summary of the design and proper use of Inject and Extract, regardless of the particular OpenTracing language or OpenTracing implementation.

"The Big Picture" for explicit trace propagation

The hardest thing about distributed tracing is the distributed part. Any tracing system needs a way of understanding the causal relationship between activities in many distinct processes, whether they be connected via formal RPC frameworks, pub-sub systems, generic message queues, direct HTTP calls, best-effort UDP packets, or something else entirely.

Some distributed tracing systems (e.g., Project5 from 2003, or WAP5 from 2006 or The Mystery Machine from 2014) infer causal relationships across process boundaries. Of course there is a tradeoff between the apparent convenience of these black-box inference-based approaches and the freshness and quality of the assembled traces. Per the concern about quality, OpenTracing is an explicit distributed tracing instrumentation standard, and as such it is much better-aligned with approaches like X-Trace from 2007, Dapper from 2010, or numerous open-source tracing systems like Zipkin or Appdash (among others).

Together, Inject and Extract allow for inter-process trace propagation without tightly coupling the programmer to a particular OpenTracing implementation.

Requirements for the OpenTracing propagation scheme

For Inject and Extract to be useful, all of the following must be true:

Per the above, the OpenTracing user handling cross-process trace propagation must not need to write OpenTracing-implementation-specific code

OpenTracing implementations must not need special handlers for every known inter-process communication mechanism: that's far too much work, and it's not even well-defined

That said, the propagation mechanism should be extensible for optimizations

The basic approach: Inject, Extract, and Carriers

Any SpanContext in a trace may be Injected into what OpenTracing refers to as a Carrier. A Carrier is an interface or data structure that's useful for inter-process communication (IPC); that is, the Carrier is something that "carries" the tracing state from one process to another. The OpenTracing specification includes two required Carrier formats, though custom Carrier formats are possible as well.

Similarly, given a Carrier, an injected trace may be Extracted, yielding a SpanContext instance which is semantically identical to the one Injected into the Carrier.

Extract pseudocode example

inbound_request = ...
# We'll again use the (builtin) HTTP_HEADERS carrier format. Per the# HTTP_HEADERS documentation, we can use a map that has extraneous data# in it and let the OpenTracing implementation look for the subset# of key:value pairs it needs.## As such, we directly use the key:value `inbound_request.headers`# map as the carrier.
carrier = inbound_request.headers
span_context = tracer.extract(opentracing.Format.HTTP_HEADERS, carrier)
# Continue the trace given span_context. E.g.,
span = tracer.start_span("...", child_of=span_context)
# (If `carrier` held trace data, `span` will now be ready to use.)

Carriers have formats

All Carriers have a format. In some OpenTracing languages, the format must be specified explicitly as a constant or string; in others, the format is inferred from the Carrier's static type information.

Required Inject/Extract Carrier formats

At a minimum, all platforms require OpenTracing implementations to support two Carrier formats: the "text map" format and the "binary" format.

The text map Carrier format is a platform-idiomatic map from (unicode) string to string

The binary Carrier format is an opaque byte array (and presumably more compact and efficient)

What the OpenTracing implementations choose to store in these Carriers is not formally defined by the OpenTracing specification, but the presumption is that they find a way to encode "tracer state" about the propagated SpanContext (e.g., in Dapper this would include a trace_id, a span_id, and a bitmask representing the sampling status for the given trace) as well as any key:value Baggage items.

There is no expectation that different OpenTracing implementations Inject and Extract SpanContexts in compatible ways. Though OpenTracing is agnostic about the tracing implementation across an entire distributed system, for successful inter-process handoff it's essential that the processes on both sides of a propagation use the same tracing implementation.

Custom Inject/Extract Carrier formats

Any propagation subsystem (an RPC library, a message queue, etc) may choose to introduce their own custom Inject/Extract Carrier format; by preferring their custom format but falling back to a required OpenTracing format as needed they allow OpenTracing implementations to optimize for their custom format without needing OpenTracing implementations to support their format.

Some pseudocode will make this less abstract. Imagine that we're the author of the (sadly fictitious) ArrrPC pirate RPC subsystem, and we want to add OpenTracing support to our outbound RPC requests. Minus some error handling, our pseudocode might look like this:

span_context = ...
outbound_request = ...
# First we try our custom Carrier, the outbound_request itself.# If the underlying OpenTracing implementation cares to support# it, this call is presumably more efficient in this process# and over the wire. But, since this is a non-required format,# we must also account for the possibility that the OpenTracing# implementation does not support arrrpc.ARRRPC_OT_CARRIER.try:
tracer.inject(span_context, arrrpc.ARRRPC_OT_CARRIER, outbound_request)
except opentracing.UnsupportedFormatException:
# If unsupported, fall back on a required OpenTracing format.
carrier = {}
tracer.inject(span_context, opentracing.Format.HTTP_HEADERS, carrier)
# `carrier` now contains (opaque) key:value pairs which we# pass along over whatever wire protocol we already use.for key, value in carrier:
outbound_request.headers[key] = escape(value)

More about custom Carrier formats

The precise representation of the "Carrier formats" may vary from platform to platform, but in all cases they should be drawn from a global namespace. Support for a new custom carrier format must not necessitate changes to the core OpenTracing platform APIs, though each OpenTracing platform API must define the required OpenTracing carrier formats (e.g., string maps and binary blobs). For example, if the maintainer of ArrrPC RPC framework wanted to define an "ArrrPC" Inject/Extract format, she or he must be able to do so without sending a PR to OpenTracing maintainers (though of course OpenTracing implementations are not required to support the "ArrrPC" format). There is an end-to-end injector and extractor example below to make this more concrete.

An end-to-end Inject and Extract propagation example

To make the above more concrete, consider the following sequence:

A client process has a SpanContext instance and is about to make an RPC over a home-grown HTTP protocol

That client process calls Tracer.Inject(...), passing the active SpanContext instance, a format identifier for a text map, and a text map Carrier as parameters

Inject has populated the text map in the Carrier; the client application encodes that map within its homegrown HTTP protocol (e.g., as headers)

The HTTP request happens and the data crosses process boundaries...

Now in the server process, the application code decodes the text map from the homegrown HTTP protocol and uses it to initialize a text map Carrier

The server process calls Tracer.Extract(...), passing in the desired operation name, a format identifier for a text map, and the Carrier from above

In the absence of data corruption or other errors, the server now has a SpanContext instance that belongs to the same trace as the one in the client